Ask HN: What's the easiest way to make a living with $600k in cash?

First quesiton is: is it savings or windfall? This determines your risk profile. Savings, you can make over again because you've already made $600k once the hardest way possible. Windfall, thank lucky stars and secure that shit.

I'd wonder why leveraging it to buy or build a duplex or triplex in a city on the obvious list? The key thing is to tie it up so that it doesn't make you lazy. My wealthy friends are getting the F out of cash because of its rapidly diminishing purchasing power. There's no way out of what's going on at a macro level without inflation and high interest rates, so anything that returns better than -8% yoy is going to be better.

Having that net worth also means you can be super aggressive with hunting for gigs because you can afford to say 'no' to anything less than $200k+ if you are in US/CAN market. Even though it's not a lot of money from a wealth perspective, (you're on the second bottom rung of a very tall ladder) from a job hunting perspective, you have FU money so long as you don't spend it. You can take a passion project for a non-profit and moonlight with another contract part time and if either of them don't like it you can walk.

You also have accredited investor status, so you can take flyers of as little as 20-30k participating in seed rounds, which pops you out of being just another dev and now you're an investor with depth on the tech, which is a whole new game. If you're contracting and your triplex mortgage is covered by your tenants, you can afford do a couple of these seed rounds a year.

The only way anyone makes real money is with leverage, and the duplex is low risk secured leverage. At the other end of the spectrum, you could just put it into a robinhood account and buy stonks and hang out on WSB, but post-pandemic govts with their own currencies don't need good markets or economies to stay in power anymore, and inflationary policies are about impoverishing people, so they benefit from destroying the markets. This is handwavy, but I take insight over advice any day.

If you understand the difference between the real and the represented, you can live like an actual king for very little money. Suffice it to say that nothing makes you poorer than trying to be middle class, as by definition, poverty is when you don't value what you have. Frugality is bargaining with a universe that doesn't care, and the thing about the greatest pleasures is they are always worth it by a significant multiple. This is to say, don't spend a penny on yourself until you know the person you are spending it on will appreciate it, and you have read the stoics, imo.

Im in almost the exact same boat as you, both monetarily and in terms of goals.

My email is in my profile. If you are interested, message me if you want to talk and see if there is anything we could collaborate on.

My biggest interest lies in building a lifestyle business around coliving.

Step 1: Don't take advice from people on HackerNews

Step 2: Why are you still listening to me?

But seriously, there's a million ways to lose money and not as many ways to make it. Find the thing that gives you joy and that you're good at and that the world is willing to pay something for and if you can find that magic connection, you'll be doing more than making a living, you'll be truly living.

You can buy assets that pay dividends and move to a much, much lower cost-of-living place.

I'm talking some city in a country where the currency exchange rate values your dollars immensely wrt. groceries, etc.

You can even buy property very,very "cheap" so as to never pay rent.